I made a brief run out to Home Depot after work and had to wait awhile at the checkout because two of the four self checkout stations were out of commission. The first one had a large piece of paper taped to it that read “Out Of Cash”. The second was a bit more interesting, it was in a state of constantly rebooting. I walked up just in time to witness the famed Windows NT blue screen of death. While waiting it line it slowly crawled through the boot process, eventually making it to the desktop just to blue screen again and start all over. One thing that stood out to me was how incredibly slow this system seemed to be.
After seeing that I wasn’t exactly thrilled to feed my credit card to one of the working self check out machines.
I remember when these self check out systems went it, less that two years ago. Seems odd that such a recent system would run such an old OS with some many known problems. I wonder if Home Depot writes a big check to Microsoft every year to keep these systems afloat.
3 replies on “Home Depot Powered By Windows NT 4”
That’s really weird, because most of Home Depot’s in-store systems have been Linux-based since 2001 or so.
Linux??? at our HD, ive seen all the training computers and inventory systems and its all MS.
HD was supposed to being using linux for some servers, some mobile ordering functions at their EXPO design stores, and maybe a few other things. But after working in an regular Home Depot store, all they use is windows and it’s slow as hell.
Cashier systems use Windows 2000, special services use winxp, and self check out uses winxp but is the most painfully slow of them all.